Ida

It was a long ride down from the Wee Wah Lodge and into Manhattan on a weekend kindly given by Mrs Spedden when she didn’t need her maid so much. Even in early June, the weather there was hotter and harsher than anything Ellen Bird had ever been used to, back in Norfolk where she was born. The colours were all wrong too. Ellen felt a stab of loss in her chest, tucked under her right breast; she missed the summers in England. Not for the first time after, she was surprised by feeling anything at all, as if she’d breathed all of her feeling out in puffs of vapour in the icy air. As if she had no right to feeling at all, any more.

She hadn’t slept well since it had happened. Two months later, she still woke up struggling to breathe, and there weren’t enough sheets on the bed, ever, to make her feet feel warm. On the train, even in the oppressive heat of a New York summer, her feet didn’t feel truly warm. Maybe they never really would again? Perhaps that was the small price paid for her survival? If so, she would have given it again. She would have given anything to save herself from going into the water that night and, if that made her a coward then she was nothing that God didn’t make her, and it wasn’t like she hadn’t suffered, afterwards. It wasn’t like she hadn’t prayed for all those people, fifteen hundred and more souls, their bodies made of out of salted ice.

It wasn’t as though she hadn’t wept.

A woman asked her if she might take the seat beside her, close to the window, and Ellen rose to make way. Her overnight bag was tucked into the wire rack above her head, but she kept the large package close to her chest. She had carried it back from the middle of the sea with her, on her shoulders. She’d huddled in it on the deck of the Carpathia, away from the fearsome frost. She’d carried it all of that way, by then, and she would carry it a little further still. It was the least that she could do, when Mrs Straus had been so kind to her, in what time she’d known her. It hadn’t been very long, not in the grand scheme of things, but it might as well have been forever, for everything that had happened, and everything that Ellen had seen come to pass.

Around her, people nodded and dozed in the heat. Ellen closed her eyes but stayed awake, bolt upright in her seat, padded for comfort on long rides. She worked her fingers through the join in the edges of the brown packing paper, until she found the the fur, black as night and so soft. Sable, Mrs Spedden had said. Sable, which had once run free in Russia, and survived the cold twice over. When the steward had come, he’d suggested top coats and hats. It was wickedly cold up on the deck in the night. Ellen had helped Mrs Straus into her fur and her lifebelt before she’d put on her own coat. That was what you did. You helped your mistress, then you helped yourself. She’d still been fastening her buttons with clumsy gloved fingers as they’d made their way up onto the deck. All the way there, other maids had been brushing past them, bobbing heads in apology as they hurried down the halls. So many of those girls must have drowned, after they went back to boil water for tea. Nobody thought they were going to be out there for a very long time. Those other women thought that it would blow over and it never occurred to one of them that they might be sending those girls to their deaths. Mrs Straus had never cared for tea.

That ship was supposed to be unsinkable.

Between her glove and the cuff of her dress, Ellen’s wrist was bare. She’d never had the money to waste on a watch. That night on the deck she hadn’t worn a watch and so it had felt like eternity and no time at all, both at the same time. It had all happened too fast for her to truly understand it. It was the finest ship in the world, but it was a piece of fine work that unravelled to nothing but threads and pins in a matter of minutes. Gone, all gone.

People would like to talk about it, maybe: the bravery of some people and the cowardice of others…how quickly everything had fallen apart, there, right at the very end. They’d somehow make it loud and exciting, or dignified and solemn with the weight of some great history. It hadn’t felt like great history, at the time. What it had felt like, at the time, was knowing the date of her own death, down to the minute. What it had felt like, actually being there, was knowing that she could no longer believe in God as she had believed in Him before.

There had been children crying, and women crying, and even the odd man crying, and everything had gone to Hell. Ellen had been too frightened to make a sound, and Mrs Straus had taken her firmly by the hand and drawn her with her and made sure that she wasn’t lost. That was a brave woman, right there. That was a woman who had bore seven children, and lost one, and kept going. That was a woman who had sailed to a new world in her youth, and made her life there, and made it well. If Mrs Straus had been afraid then she hadn’t let it show. She had taken Ellen by the hand and drawn her with them, all the while following her husband, and never letting him out of her sight.

The band was playing. The band had been playing something that Ellen had last heard when people were dancing. Nobody was dancing then, but, all her life, Ellen would remember the song that they were playing. Mrs Straus had called it something in German, and Mr Straus had nodded his head.

Life boat no. 8. Ellen had turned thirty-one years old the day before entering Mrs Straus’ service, and two days before they left Southampton, but if she lived for forever and a day, she would never forget the number painted on the white wood of the boat. Eight. Her luckiest number forever. Women and children only, the officer had been saying. Women and children only, but he’d made an exception for Mr Straus with his grey whiskers, his hand holding onto Mrs Straus’ so tightly that, in their gloves, their knuckles must surely have been bone white. Ellen had already been in a seat on the far side of the boat, ushered in by the steward and Mrs Straus both. She couldn’t do anything but watch them, and try to hear them, over all the rushing noise of the people and the water.

Mr Straus had begged her, begged his Ida, in the end. He’d begged her to be a little selfish…To not always think of others. He had known, then, that he would not go in the boat while they were still women and children to take those seats, but he had hoped that Ida would go with Ellen, go on without him and live to go home and remember him as a hero to his children. He had hoped that Ida would go on without him, and live.

Ida Straus set foot in lifeboat no. 8. just the once. She’d lost her hat, somewhere in the chaos, so, when she swept the sable fur from her shoulders, her hair blew against her cheek in soft grey curls. She’d settled the fur around Ellen’s shoulders and said something to her in German, something that Ellen would never understand but never forget, either. I will not be needing it, she said, and stepped out of the boat and back onto the deck. The lifeboat started to lower, with a sick sway, and Ellen had lost the couple in the dark up above them, and she had never set eyes on them again.

The papers would repeat what Ida Straus had said next, said to her husband, when they held her up as an example of Jewish womanhood, of good wives. They’d report it word for word, as repeated to them by witnesses, but it came to Ellen mostly by the reading of her lips.

“We have lived together for many years. Where you go, I go.”

It had become her story then, she supposed. The story of Ellen Bird, who was born in Old Buckenham, Norfolk, the daughter of a shepherd and his wife.

Ellen Bird, who survived the sinking of the Titanic.

She counted thirty five women in lifeboat No.8. Thirty five of them, and how many of them had left husbands or fathers behind? Some of them wore very fine coats, but none of them as fine as the fur that Ellen huddled in, the one that Ida Straus wouldn’t be needing any more, no matter how cold she got before the end. As they watched, the ship sank lower and the sky got darker still, and the man in the boat, the one in the uniform, he told them to row towards the light in the north. They rowed, hard as they could, but Ellen never saw a light.

From the dock, she’d thought that it was surely too big to move under its own power and, as she watched it tilt and swoon into the cold, dark water, she wondered at the fact that it had stayed afloat for as long as it had, at all. Ellen felt every crack and every sig of the great ship in her bones and yet it all fell apart so quick. The water rose and lapped at the polished deck and people ran and screamed, with nowhere to go. They watched from the lifeboats, so afraid that, at the last moment, the whole ocean would somehow open and take them all down with Titanic, punishment for the sin of pride, for imagining that there was anything in the whole wide world that God couldn’t sink, if he chose. The propellers had come right out of the water, like teeth, like a woman with her mouth open, and crying towards heaven for release. A release that would never come, because Titanic was going down, and there would be no saving her. The great funnels fell, which looked to Ellen for all the world like someone throwing up her hands in utter despair, and, not long after that, the lights went out, and the women on the boat watched what happened next by the sickly green glow of the flares. They watched as Titanic folded in on herself, with a great cracking, splintering sound, and sank finally below the surface, and died.

Gone, all gone, and fare thee well, Titanic. Fare thee well.

There was such screaming, afterwards, such horrible noise. One of the men in the boat wanted them to row back, to pick up some of the poor souls who’d gone into the water, so cold, and some of the women agreed with him, but most didn’t. Most were fearful of being dragged under by the sheer weight of people scrambling to be saved. Ellen herself was too terrified to say a word, and, in the end, they started to row again, away from where Titanic had been, pulling towards the light.

Rowing, Ellen sweated under Ida Straus’ sable fur, and it took such a long time for all of the screaming to stop.

Pennsylvania Station was cramped and noisy, such a flood of people. Ellen stood still, the package clasped against her chest with one arm, and let them pass around her. She didn’t have it in her to force her way past them, through them. She’d done all the surviving that she physically had in her. There had been over two thousand souls on board when they’d left Ireland, nothing between them and America but all of that water. She’d never expected it to be so cold, the water. People had told her that they’d pulled nine people out of the water, but three of them had gone too far to be saved. Their bodies were already solid ice, and they died on the deck of the Carpathia. Rescued, they were, but never saved.

What she wanted, when she came out of the station, was a breeze, a gust of fresh air to blow away the train and the dreams and the smell of other people. The air was muggy and heavy. She wished that it would rain to cool things off. Rain was a good thing in summer, and a million miles away from the dry, dry cold which haunted her. Walking, the package was cumbersome. One handed, she shifted it against her chest so as not to drop it. It would be wrong to drop it now, so close to the end of her pilgrimage. As she walked down 7th Avenue, it occurred to Ellen that this would have been her home, if she’d come here with the Strauses; that she would have come to know this place well. Instead, Ellen had come to this place like any other migrant, and known that she could not go home. America was her home. She had been delivered. She had been given to a new world.

She was bringing the fur back. She was returning it to its rightful place. In her little room back in Tuxedo Park, she’d kept it folded under the bed, and, occasionally, she’d removed it, buried both of her hands in the soft thickness of it and remembered the little boat, remembered the rowing, and the praying, the soft sound of some woman behind her weeping for her man, lost at sea. Pull for the light, the man had said but the only light that Ellen ever saw was the one behind them. The Titanic’s lights, which, one by one, flickered, and went out. When she touched it, she remembered those things, but she also remembered the kindness in Ida Straus’ face and the iron in her handns when she’d pushed Ellen down into Lifeboat no.8, and gotten out herself, and gone back to her husband’s side. A paper that Ellen had seen called it heroism, Mr and Mrs Straus and what they’d done. They’d talked about radiance over all humanity, like something bright. Like the sun rising. To Ellen in the boat, all it had looked like was love, pure love. Simply that.

Mrs Spedden had checked for Ellen, found out that Mrs Sara Straus Hess lived at 154 West 22nd Street. As she turned the corner, onto the street of large, redbrick houses, Ellen rehearsed what she was going to say to Sara Hess, who had been Sara Straus.

Good afternoon, Ma’am. My name is Ellen Bird and I was in Mrs Straus’ service when she boarded the Titanic, and this was hers, and she gave it to me, and now I’m giving it to you, because its too fine a thing for me and if she’d lived then she wouldn’t ever have seen it with a person like me. I’m sorry that your mother died, Miss. I’m sorry that your father died. They were good people, Miss. They were good people, and they saved me, God bless them. They saved me.

On the doorstep of the house, Ellen paused. She set her overnight bag down by her feet, and she straightened her hat, and the plain collar of her dress. She hugged the fur against her like something very precious. Brown packing paper crackled. She reached up, knocking on the door with three raps on the brass knocker, shone to within an inch of its life. A shiver went down her spine, turned the sweat between her shift and skin cold. It had been two months, and still no sign of Ida Straus’ body. They waited as long as they could to bury Isidor, longer than they should have but, still, Mrs Straus had not come home to New York City.

As she stood on the doorstep, listening to footsteps coming towards her from inside the house, Ellen wondered if she was going to spend her whole life thinking about Mrs Straus and the hundreds of others who were never going to come home, if she was going to spend her whole life, however long she had left, just thinking about them, and pulling towards the light.